Malcolm Harris - Share or Die

Neal Gorenflo

About six months ago, a weather-beaten, middle-aged man asked me for money on the platform of the Mountain View Caltrain station.

I gave him three dollars. He thanked me and asked what I did for work. I introduced myself and learned his name (Jeff), and we shook hands. I pulled a card from my computer bag and handed it to him as I told him that I publish an online magazine about sharing.

Jeff lit up, Oh, I get that. When youre homeless, its share or die.

That got my attention, and I asked him to explain. Jeff said that a year earlier, his girlfriend had drunk herself to death alone in a motel room. He said she wouldnt have died had someone been with her. For him, isolation meant death.

Jeff explained his perspective further: He has no problem giving his last dollar or cigarette to a friend; it comes back when you need it. But there are those who just take. You stay away from them.

I asked him about the homeless people in Mountain View, which is in the middle of prosperous Silicon Valley. Jeff said there are 800 homeless people in the city and that each has a similar story.

That conversation got under my skin. I shared it with Malcolm Harris the next day during a call about this book. Half-joking, I suggested Jeffs phrase, share or die, as a title. At the time, I thought it was over the top. I wasnt serious. But Malcolm began using it in correspondence about the book. It stuck.

My conversation with Jeff marked a turning point in my thinking. I had thought of sharing as merely smart because it creates positive social, environmental and economic change through one strategy.

But Jeffs story and the directness of his phrase share or die broke through my intellectualization of sharing. Jeff helped me see something that I was blind to, even though I knew all the facts that sharing is not just a smart strategy; its necessary for our survival as a species. This has always been so, but today our condition is especially acute were using 50 percent more natural resources per year than the earth can replace. And global population and per-capita consumption are growing. Its now glaringly obvious to me that we need to learn to share on a global scale fast or die.

But the threat is not only one of biological death. Those like me, who are in no danger of starving, face a spiritual death when we act as if well-being is a private affair, and gate ourselves off from the rest of humanity with money and property. We can neither survive nor live well unless we share. Its my outrageous hope that the young voices in this book will do for a generation what Jeff did for me wake them to the idea that sharing can save them and the world.